


Ways Of Moving On

by amyfortuna



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Condoms, Cunnilingus, F/M, First Time, Heterosexual Sex, Humor, Loss of Virginity, Masturbation, Safer Sex, Unconventional Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-23
Updated: 2012-02-23
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:13:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/pseuds/amyfortuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Molly falls head over heels in lust with Sherlock when they first meet. She's not so blind that she can't see his faults. She just wants him anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ways Of Moving On

**Author's Note:**

> Louise Brealey exclusively revealed what the Christmas present Molly gave Sherlock was on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/louisebrealey/status/159928796961705984). I ran with it, first for ALL THE LOLZ, and then it developed into a look at Molly Hooper as someone who was very aware and accepting of her own sexual desires, while still keeping her awkwardly sweet self as close to canon as possible.

He swanned in with the cheekbones and the dark coat set off by the dark curls and Molly immediately got slippery in places she’d nearly forgotten existed. _Holy fuck_ , she thought to herself, tongue pressed hard against the roof of her mouth to avoid actually licking her lips in front of him, _holy fuck, he’s pretty_. 

And then when he asked for a recently deceased and proceeded to beat the ever-living daylights out of Mr Wollerton with a handy riding crop - _a handy riding crop, what the fuck?_ \- she just stood by and watched, almost feeling the sensation of the blows on her own skin. The minute she got home that night she pounced on her vibrator and didn’t even get herself properly undressed, just threw herself down on her sofa, still wearing her skirt, knickers half off, the Rabbit up her, thrusting forcefully with her free hand, head back, eyes closed, “Sherlock, Sherlock, oh, god, _Sherlock_ ,” and then incoherence as she spasmed frantically around the toy. 

A moment to recover, and she gave a half-laugh to herself, and imagined him all undone on top of her, somehow still oddly wearing the coat, face desperate and mouth open, panting, neck exposed. The toy didn’t even come out before she was pushing herself to another orgasm with it, knowing she was leaking onto her skirt and possibly onto the cushion below and not actually caring one tiny goddamn bit, just “Sherlock” and “please” and imagining that riding crop in his hands, his focus totally on her. She arched, biting off a scream into a gasp, and came again, fumbling with the vibrator to turn it off as the sensation was suddenly totally overwhelming. 

Breathless and panting, she went limp and lay dazed and dreaming, the toy by degrees slipping out of her. She felt totally relaxed but buzzing at the same time, the thought of Sherlock filling her with butterflies, equal parts nervousness and arousal. 

“Sherlock,” she whispered, and put out a hand to an imaginary partner, holding it up briefly before letting the hand fall.

* * *

In the following few weeks, she got to know all about Sherlock. Not very much from the man himself, but everyone who knew him seemed keen to talk about him, usually quite eager to slag him off in some way or another. Molly listened to everything they said, because it was information about him, but like a good scientist should, relied mostly on her own eyes and ears to tell her the facts. 

The facts were these: Sherlock treated her like she wasn’t even there half the time, ignored any attempts at small talk, flirtation, or any discussion at all that wasn’t strictly about what he was there for. But she also noticed that he came straight to her lab for anything that needed to be done, rather than go to another lab, or goodness knew, another hospital. So clearly she was at least tolerable. And just because he kept putting her off didn’t mean she was going to stop trying. Coffee, lipstick, offers of lunch, coming a little too close to touching him at times - every try was met with insults, but she was getting to know him now, and the insults weren’t insults to him, really, just his version of honesty or social cluelessness. He liked having her around, that came through. 

Liking to have someone around doesn’t generally do anything about the sexual frustration aspects though. Molly met Jim when her computer broke down one rainy afternoon. Sherlock hadn’t been by that day, and she was buried in paperwork, and this was the last straw really. And Jim was so sweet and subtle about it too, just sliding a note with his phone number and a cheeky “Call me” with a smily face under her keyboard. She liked his little grin and his dark hair, so she called him that evening, and they went out for drinks that Friday night. That went well, so they went out again the following Friday. She was definitely ready to move forward with him. 

Back at her place, she made him coffee, and he unwrapped her on the sofa like a Christmas present, eyes alight as he unbuttoned her top, mouthing her breast through her bra. She laughed and threw back her head, pulling her skirt up with one hand. Jim slid down to her cunt quickly, tonguing her through her slightly damp knickers and then pulling them down and off. His tongue was instantly back on her cunt and she took a frantic breath as he began to eat her out. Like a lightning flash, the thought, “What if it was Sherlock?” invaded all of her mind, and she was suddenly pushing up against his mouth, half a breath from crying out Sherlock’s name. Jim took the hint and began to lick harder, faster, as she drowned in sensation and imagination. On the verge of coming, she gasped desperately, frantic to avoid the name, and at the last second put a hand over her mouth and wailed his name as her orgasm hit. 

Jim kept licking all through it, but with just a few seconds for recovery, pulled her upright. She was dishevelled and already looked well-fucked, skirt around her waist, top half off, underwear on the floor next to her heels. He was still completely dressed, and all he did was unzip his trousers and pull himself out through the slit in his boxers. Molly looked around, and grabbed the condom in its packet from the edge of the coffee table. She ripped open the packet and, with shaking hands, rolled the condom on over his cock. She took his hands and they manoeuvred into a comfortable position, her mostly in his lap, legs to either side of him. 

She slid down onto his cock, and his hands came around her, holding her arse. She looked down at him, feeling him inside her. His mouth was open, eyes heavy-lidded, and he was thrusting up into her with tiny minute twitches that felt so, so good. 

“Oh, honey, that’s it,” he whispered. “You are amazing.” And he began thrusting in earnest now. She quickly got the idea and they found a rhythm, rocking together hard and fast. He was panting now himself, eyes wide open, breath coming in gasps that almost sounded like words. 

“Kiss me,” she suddenly demanded, and he obeyed, pushing his tongue between her lips. Their rhythm sped up, the sofa back knocking against the wall. She kept kissing him as he buried himself to the hilt inside her and stuttered to a stop, tearing his mouth away from hers with a breathless, wordless, frantic cry as he came. 

He fell back against the sofa and she went with him, leaning her head against his shoulder as they both recovered. 

“Well then darling,” he said at last, eyes closed, giving off the impression of a relaxed and happy man, “Same time next week?”

“Suits me,” she said, and gingerly removed herself from his lap, taking a moment to appreciate how utterly debauched he looked, clothes rumpled, cock out, head back and eyes closed. Not Sherlock, but he’d do in the meantime, that was for sure.

* * *

When Sherlock revealed Jim’s supposed gayness, it was a bit of a shock. She didn’t believe it, but suddenly all those half-mouthed words he’d gasped when they had sex made sense in one way and totally not in another - they were all ‘Sher - Sh - Sherl’ but this was the first time he’d ever met Sherlock, surely. Certainly Sherlock himself had given no indication they’d ever met before. But maybe Jim had seen Sherlock around the building, and maybe Sherlock’s charms, dark coat, dark curls, cheekbones, etc, worked on men just as well as women. Why wouldn’t they? 

So it was kind of understandable but also kind of deceptive, and Molly wasted no time in breaking it off. They’d only been out on three dates, if you didn’t count the best part of a weekend spent in bed together as more than one date. Molly carefully pushed down the thought that she’d been engaging in the exact same kind of deception about the exact same person, and sent him a text asking if they could meet somewhere that evening. 

Jim didn’t respond to that text, so she went by his desk to discover that he was gone. Cleaned out his effects and departed with only three days notice, apparently. She sent another text that evening, and then another the next day. 

When he didn’t respond to any of those, she sent a final I-never-want-to-see-you-again text and considered the matter closed. Well, at least until Sherlock came by a few days later and told her exactly who Jim Moriarty was. 

“Makes quite a lot of sense,” she said calmly, because it did, actually, and Sherlock gave her a considering look, head tilted, then went back to his microscope. 

She dated another three men in the next year. It felt like after ages of drought the offers were finally flooding in, although three could hardly be considered a flood. None of them looked like Sherlock, or reminded her of Sherlock in any way, and also none of them lasted beyond that critical third date. She just got really bored with them, really fast.

* * *

Christmas approached and Sherlock’s flatmate - John, she reminded herself, he has a name - invited her to a “Christmas drinks thing” one day when he and Sherlock were at the lab. 

“Who else is going to be there?” she asked. 

“Well, Sherlock, obviously,” John said, making a somewhat impatient gesture at the man in the corner staring through the microscope. “Um, our landlady, Mrs Hudson. My girlfriend, Jeanette. Possibly one of the inspectors from New Scotland Yard who we work with a lot, Greg Lestrade, I dunno if you’ve met.” 

“Oh, um, yeah,” Molly said. “I remember him, a silver fox kind of guy.” 

John shrugged. “I suppose. Um, I think that’s it, unless I can get my sister Harry to come over. I know Sherlock would have a fit if I invited his brother, so I’m not doing that.” 

“Sherlock’s not much of a family man?” Molly asked, equal parts curiosity and amusement. 

John made another gesture toward him. “Do you think, really?”

“Nah,” Molly said, looking over. “He’s just not made for it, is he?”

“He can’t even keep body parts out of the fridge. Drives Mrs Hudson round the twist. I’ve become inured to it by now, I just keep all the food on the top shelf because he never puts anything up there.” 

“I think I will go,” Molly said carefully. “Really not looking in your fridge though.”

* * *

“…You’re a complete idiot, John, abandoning me for Christmas to go see your sister! Says she’s off the booze, she’s not, or did you miss the slur in her voice last time she called, because I didn’t!”

Sherlock paused in his angry rant, looking up from the microscope, and glanced over toward Molly at the other end of the lab. “John? Over here.” Molly looked up and walked over to him.

“It’s Molly,” she said, quiet and deadly. “John’s in Northumberland this week.” 

Sherlock made an impatient gesture. “I don’t care. Tell me what you see under this microscope.”

She bent forward, suddenly conscious of her hair spilling about her face. The eyepiece of the microscope was warm from his face and she couldn’t resist a shiver.

* * *

She had the day of the party off as a Christmas shopping day, and spent the morning wandering around Oxford Street and Covent Garden, at a total loss for what to get Sherlock. Mrs Hudson would be easily pleased with some posh bath stuff, and she guessed the same for Jeanette, having never met her, John and Greg both would be happy with small digital voice recorders for note-taking, but Sherlock, Sherlock. He was a frustrating, socially maladjusted, freaking gorgeous weirdo, and she wanted to grab his attention, get that focus on her for a bit. 

In desperation she finally wandered into a joke shop, and poked around for a while, considering and dismissing various things. If she was going to do this properly, she wanted something that Sherlock wouldn’t guess, couldn’t predict and would be completely terrified by. 

Then she saw them, rows of boxes of mankinis stacked on a shelf. She picked up a leopard print one, and considered Sherlock in it for a long moment. 

The shop assistant heard her laughing from the other end of the store, laughing until the tears rolled down her face, and approached gingerly, asking “Are you okay?” 

She held the mankini out to him, struggling to get the giggles under control. “I’ll take it,” she said. 

Back home, she wrapped it up carefully along with the other gifts, and if she gave it a bit more careful of a wrapping job than the other presents, it was mostly because she was having a harder time keeping the giggles down and was more precise to compensate.

* * *

Sherlock never actually opened the gift in front of her, choosing instead to try and deduce her love life from its wrapping. While he got the technical details, he missed the overall point, but was on the money enough for her to feel a fair bit embarrassed, and a good bit angry and upset, enough to say something about how he made her feel. 

The kiss and the apology were both completely unexpected and a little overwhelming. The embarrassment that followed when the phone made itself known was nearly devastating; she struggled to keep it together and made her apologies very quickly in the wake of Sherlock’s complete abandonment of the party. 

Back home again, she was just settling on the sofa with a glass of wine and the remote in her hand when her phone rang. It was John, apologising again about the failure of the party. 

“Listen,” she said. “I left my gifts for you all there, I’m fine if you open yours and give the rest of them theirs, but I think my timing was…poor… on Sherlock’s, can you, I don’t know, just remove it, put it in his closet or something.”

“That’s no problem,” John said, then with a note of curiosity, “Can you tell me what it is?”

She dissolved into nervous giggles. “No, no, I really can’t,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. She could feel the blush creeping up her face. 

John laughed politely. “No worries, I’ll put it away.”

* * *

The next morning she looked out her window to where a black car was waiting. A man with an umbrella stood just outside, looking up. He gestured slightly, meeting her eyes, and she threw on some clothes and went down. 

“Mycroft Holmes,” he said, offering a hand. “You are Molly Hooper, and I need your assistance.” 

She nodded once and got into the car. 

At the morgue, and following Mycroft’s instructions, she prepared Irene Adler’s body while Mycroft waited outside for his brother to arrive. The body had been dressed in a plain black blouse with a black skirt, no jewellery except a gold chain around her neck. Carefully, Molly removed the clothes, shoes, underwear and the necklace, putting them away in the appropriate boxes. She brushed the hair back from the face, and went through all the motions she’d performed a thousand times before. By the time Sherlock arrived, the body was ready, covered with a sheet. 

The next few minutes were a rollercoaster of emotion. Sherlock said the first, the very first, thoughtfully sensitive words he had ever said to her. And then immediately was able to identify the body from, well, not the face. Which implied that he knew what this woman - _this woman_ \- looked like naked. 

Molly puzzled over it the rest of the day, then dismissed it, and then when Sherlock X-rayed the phone, puzzled over it again but couldn’t bring herself to ask.

* * *

Time went by, and things settled back into a pattern. She was following Sherlock and John more on the blog now than in person, as they tried to keep up with Sherlock’s rising reputation. She met a nice young man out one evening and made a lunch date with him for the next day. 

Of course, the next day, Sherlock burst through the doors of the lab just as she was on her way out. How could she resist? Especially with that voice, telling her she should avoid all attempts at a relationship for the good of the country. For Sherlock Holmes, that was practically flirting, and she could sense it. She dropped her lunch date with a quick text about a work emergency and followed Sherlock and John into the lab. 

Despite the good mood he was apparently in, there was something a little different about him today, she quickly noticed. She’d been watching him from the shadows for ages now, she could tell. His mood was just a little too bright, followed by just a shade too dark. Something was wrong. 

“I don’t count,” she said, and made her offer. Of course it came out all wrong, or maybe exactly, unconsciously right, and she could feel herself cringing. She had to leave the room before the tears started, so she made a quick excuse about getting something else to eat, but didn’t head for the canteen, just quietly slipping into the nearest loo and splashing her face with water. 

This was all nonsense. It was futile and it was never going to happen, she told herself, shaking her head at the face in the mirror. He barely knew she was alive, after all this time. She didn’t count, he didn’t care, and she’d put it out there practically on a plate - _you can have me_ \- only to be rejected. It was time to move on. No more being pushed around, dates interrupted, Christmas interrupted, no more of it. And she sagged back against the wall, head in her hands. No more excitement, no more thrills, just mundane everyday life. It was time she faced it. It was time to move on. 

It was a long time before she came out of the loo, and when she went back to the lab, they had gone. She started her Sherlock-free existence by cleaning every tool he had ever used, from microscope slides on up. It was several hours later that she was finally clearing up the last of the books that had migrated to the lab in the last few weeks. She opened the door to the corridor after putting them away, and he stepped out of the shadows. 

And he told her she counted, that he felt he was going to die, asked her if she would help, even if he wasn’t who she thought he was, who he knew he was. 

She didn’t even need to say yes to that. For her, it was never about his reputation, never about the crimes he’d solved or the games he played. It was only, ever, about him. 

“What do you need?” she asked, steady and calm at last. 

“You,” he answered, and she would have cried ten thousand more tears over the last eighteen months to hear that word. She took a step toward him, instead. 

“What can I do?” 

The next hours were filled with planning. The evening went by like it was a blink. She found herself at one point frantically searching through all the corpses in the morgue for one that looked enough like Sherlock. At another point she was signing drugs out, then without even thinking about it she was having a conversation with a member of the cleaning staff, the one who drove the rubbish truck. 

Well after midnight, exhausted beyond belief, she drew some of Sherlock’s blood, willing her fingers to be steady. It was the most intimate way they had ever touched, aside from his kiss on her cheek. She could feel the warmth of him so close to her and wanted nothing more than to lean against him and close her eyes. 

Shortly after this, he told her to go lie down. She found herself on a leather sofa, covered by a blanket. He sat nearby on another sofa, silent and still, as if he were meditating. She drifted off to sleep watching his face, tired and sad, head leaning on a hand.

* * *

She was awakened by the noise of a door shutting. Sherlock wasn’t on the sofa anymore, but she could hear his voice in the next room, and John Watson’s voice answering. Where John had been all night she didn’t know, but it was certainly time to get moving now. It was light outside. She checked her phone. It was shortly after 7 AM, and there wasn’t much time to get the rest of the things done that she needed to do before the curtain lifted on the show. 

When they brought him in afterwards, pale-faced and bloody, deathly unconscious, her heart actually stopped for a moment as she considered the idea that maybe all the measures hadn’t been enough, maybe he’d really died. She took his hand, careful to take the right hand, and felt at his wrist. No pulse, and the fear and horror on her face was absolutely real as she pronounced him dead. 

Once she’d drawn the cart with his body on it into the morgue, she very gently began to do everything they had agreed together. The coat and scarf were tugged off and put to the side, to be cleaned or destroyed. Carefully, she unbuttoned his shirt, lips folded tight in concentration, and eased the small rubber ball out from under his arm and laid it away as well, definitely to be destroyed as soon as possible. 

Taking a soft damp cloth, she very carefully cleaned the matted blood from his hair and removed the remnants of plastic from where he had attached the tiny blood capsules on his scalp. Once clean, she combed through his hair with her fingers, taking an excuse now to do what she would never have dared when he was awake. His hair was just as soft as she had always thought it would be, and in his unconscious state, he looked very young and regal, like a sleeping prince, she thought to herself. Carefully looking him over, she checked for any other injuries, and was relieved to find he seemed to have escaped relatively unharmed. 

They needed to perform the switch as soon as possible, and he needed to be gone before anyone realised what had happened and came down to the morgue to see the body. John had been sent to his sister’s home with strict orders not to sleep after his concussion, and she was sure he was gone, but just to be on the safe side, she locked the door of the morgue and put a sign on it saying she was out for a few minutes. Then to be extra safe, she shoved a chair under the handle and set to her task. 

Injecting him with the necessary drug was easy enough but it was the five minutes afterwards which were the real terror. In an agony of fear lest the drug wouldn’t work, or someone would try to enter the room, she waited, holding his hand.

* * *

Sherlock came around quickly enough, groaning softly. Molly dropped the hand she had been holding, blushing furiously. “Are you okay?” she asked. 

“Yes, for the most part,” he said. “Some bruises - I feel battered - but it’s not too bad. Nothing’s broken at least.” 

“No, I w-would have picked that up,” she said, a little breathless. He slid off the cart, shaky but firm on his feet, and looked at her. 

“Molly,” he said softly. “ _Thank you_.” He bent forward, one arm curving around her shoulders, and kissed her forehead. She caught her breath, wanting the moment to go on as long as possible but knowing it couldn’t. 

“You should go,” she said at last, looking up into his face. “We don’t have much time.”

* * *

Four hours later, all the cleanup was completely finished even down to making sure the hospital roof was scrubbed clean of blood. At Sherlock’s suggestion, Jim Moriarty rested in Sherlock Holmes’ sealed coffin, ready for the funeral in three days’ time. The body was out of the hospital and the paperwork was faked so well she was sure it would have fooled even herself if she hadn’t faked it. Sherlock was waiting in her flat. They had arranged that under the cover of nightfall in the small hours of the morning, she would take him down to Poole in her car so he could get the 7 AM ferry to Cherbourg, France, where Sherlock would be hiding out for the next few weeks. She had about fourteen hours to rest before it was time for another journey. 

Carefully turning the key in the lock, she entered her flat. At first it appeared no one was there but there was an unwashed glass on the kitchen counter. She made her way to the bedroom, very gently opening the door, and smiled as she looked in at Sherlock curled up in her bed, fast asleep. 

She supposed she should be hungry; after all, she hadn’t really eaten anything since the previous day but she was really more tired than hungry. Slipping her shoes off, she made her way over to her wardrobe, pulling out a plain blue pyjama set. It wasn’t sexy or even flirty, just cotton and comfortable. She changed in the bathroom, taking a moment to splash water on her face and take her hair out of its ponytail. Then she slid onto the bed next to Sherlock, almost holding her breath. He stirred gently, and turned toward her, slowly coming awake. He was wearing a plain white cotton undershirt and boxers. 

“Do you need anything?” she asked. “Water, painkillers?” 

“No,” he said, voice gravelly with sleep. “I’m fine. Just rest.”

* * *

She awoke some hours later to find that Sherlock was still asleep next to her, on his side with a hand out toward her. If she were three inches closer the hand would have grazed her breast, and she felt a thrill go through her whole body at the wish that he would touch her like that. Her cat, Toby, also lay on the bed, purring happily in a tangle of blankets. She sighed softly and sat up. It was dark outside and she could hear the rain pattering on the roof. She switched on her bedside lamp and checked the time on her phone. 

“Sherlock,” she whispered. He came awake almost immediately, blinking, and then glanced around the room, taking her and everything else in. 

“What time is it?” he said, struggling to hold back a yawn. 

“After 10,” she answered. “We should probably both eat something, and you should take more painkillers.” He tried to move, gingerly, and winced almost immediately. 

“Ow,” he said as the bruises began to make themselves felt, and looked up at her. 

“Takeaway?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he responded. She got up, padded out to the kitchen and returned with a few delivery menus. 

“Chinese is good,” he said, struggling against another yawn. “You can order more food than would be plausible for one person and no one will think anything of it, just that you like a few different things. Also I like Chinese.” 

She smiled, sitting down on the bed, and handed him a takeaway menu. “Pick what you like.”

* * *

Two hours later, Sherlock was in the shower, and Molly was cleaning up the styrofoam containers from their takeaway. Toby had also had his dinner and was now sitting on the kitchen table watching her. She stepped over to him and gave him several strokes from head to tail, then scratched just behind his ears where she knew he liked to be scratched.

Sherlock walked out of the bedroom with a tiny towel around his waist, bare chest gleaming in the overhead light. “So what did you have that I can wear?” he asked. A droplet of water slid down his neck onto his chest and she watched it fall, mesmerised. 

Molly reminded herself to close her mouth and promptly did so a little too quickly. “Um, my brother left some clothes here the last time he came through, I think his stuff should fit you reasonably well.” 

“Fine,” Sherlock said. “How are the bruises doing?” He rearranged the towel to expose nearly everything except his groin.

She looked more closely at his chest and then at his legs, willing herself to be professional. “You landed on your front on the air cushion, and then fell about a foot to the ground from that. The brunt of it seems to have been taken by your thighs and your chest.” She gestured to his upper chest, which was beginning to go blue in small patches. “Come in the bedroom, there’s better light.”

He followed her into her bedroom, throwing the towel to the floor, and lay down on the bed, face down, so she could look at the rest of him. Gently, she stroked a hand across his shoulders. 

“Sore?” she asked at his wince. 

“A bit.”

“Sometimes the impact of a hard fall can be felt as a shock through the body. When you fell, your muscles would have been tense and tightened up for impact, so the shock would have reverberated through the tissue.” 

He nodded at that, and she drew a hand down his back, more like a caress than a clinician’s touch. The air seemed filled with expectation, electricity crackling between them now, and she couldn’t be professional anymore. She leaned forward, and gently kissed the bruised shoulder. 

He drew in a breath, and turned to his side to look at her. She was blushing furiously, and on the verge of running of out of the room. He stopped her by grabbing her hand in his. 

“Molly, it’s okay,” he said. “I want this.” He sat up, pulling her closer. His hands went around her waist, and she bent to kiss him properly. 

“So do I,” she whispered, and they kissed. 

It was an awkward kiss, a sweet kiss, and by the end of it, Molly was breathless with desire and Sherlock was hard - she could feel him against her - and she was trying to remove her pjs with one hand and stroke through Sherlock’s hair with the other. Things got much easier when he released her and started to help. It wasn’t long before she was naked, sliding into the bed beside him as he watched her. 

“What do we - I don’t -” he seemed a bit unsure of himself. She smiled. 

“Don’t worry, take it easy,” she said. “There’s no rush.” She drew him into another kiss, arms around him, loving the feel of his warm skin against hers. He smelled of her already, her soap, her bed. She could feel a yearning to cover him in the scent of her so that he could never forget her. 

His hand slid across her breasts, gently touching them. “How do you like to be touched here?” he asked. 

“A little more firmly,” she said, taking her own breast in her hand and squeezing a little. 

He repeated the motion on the other breast. “Like this?” 

“Yes,” she said, “but I also like them to be sucked on.”

“Hmm,” he said, considering, and then ducked his head down, his lips finding her right nipple. He licked gently for a moment.

“Harder,” she said, and then as he properly took the nipple into his mouth and sucked it, she could feel the sensation making her hotter, making her wetter. 

“God, that’s good,” she told him. He released the nipple, looking back up at her with a tiny hint of smugness on his face. She drew him in for another kiss, then moved her lips to his neck, tracing a line up to his ear with her tongue. 

He moaned, deep and desperate, when she drew his earlobe into her mouth and gently bit it. “Molly, what, wait…why the ear, Molly?” he said. 

“Welcome to your first erogenous zone,” she whispered breathily, tracing the whorl of his ear with her tongue. He moaned again and his hips thrust against her like he couldn't quite help it. 

Taking his hand in hers, she guided him to her vulva. He pressed the heel of his hand against her mound, sliding the tips of his fingers through the hair there. Then he slid just one long finger into her wetness, tracing up from the opening of her cunt to her clit. 

“I may never have slept with a woman before,” he said, “but I did study anatomy, and….”

His finger brushed against her swollen clit and she let out a gasp, surging against him. 

“…yes, that’s it,” he whispered, and his finger played over her clit, now circling, now darting away and darting back, now firmly, now softly. Molly lay back, helplessly moaning whenever he touched her just right, letting him learn all the right ways to touch her. 

She was close to coming when he removed his hand, and looked at her with a quick question in his eyes. “Don’t stop!” Molly said. 

“Oh god, I want…” Quickly he sat up, and rearranged himself to kneel between her legs, head dipping down to lick her. 

“That works, just please…” Desperate, her hands fluttered toward his head, and he bent forward, spreading her lips carefully and licking over her clit, once, twice, a third time. She felt herself beginning to slide into orgasm, all of her body clenched with tension, and as he licked her clit again and again, she was falling, flying, her body shaking. She could hear a voice shouting incoherence and realised it was her own. The pulses of her orgasm seemed to go on forever, and Sherlock kept licking her all the way through. 

At last she went limp, and Sherlock raised his head, looking up at her. She laughed softly with satisfaction. “Kiss me,” she requested gently. He moved up to kiss her, and she could taste herself in his mouth and feel the hard heat of him against her mound. She wanted nothing more than to have him inside her and damn the consequences but precautions had to be taken. 

Once the kiss broke, she twisted to the side, opening the small top drawer of her bedside table. She handed him a condom without further explanation, and he put it on easily. It was clearly not the first time he’d done that, at any rate. 

After that, she took his hand, lying back against the cushions of the bed. There was one more long and increasingly desperate kiss, and then she could feel him sliding into her, long and slow. Her hips surged up to meet him. He bent forward to kiss her, thrusting steadily, eyes closed and face softened. Her arms and legs went around him and they clung together, the movement of their hips their only motion. She could feel his breath against her neck, and the tiny gasps he was making as he struggled not to lose control. 

She could feel her body building to another orgasm, and before long she was coming hard again, clenching around him. He thrust harder and faster into her, mouth slightly open, looking lost in abandon in a way she’d never seen in him before. At last he buried himself in her one final time and came with a wordless shout, pulsing inside her. He fell forward onto her breast, looking stunned, and she held him there for a long minute, smiling. 

Once he regained his breath, he carefully eased himself out of her and fell to the side, landing on the bed with a groan. He removed the condom, dropping it into the bin at the side of the bed. 

“I believe it is customary at this point for the male to go to sleep,” he said. “I now understand the reasoning involved.” 

She laughed and brushed his hair out of his face. “You sleep if you want to, I’ll wake you up in a couple of hours.” He closed his eyes as she switched off the bedside lamp. 

She got up, feeling pleasantly sore, and very well-fucked. Picking up her pjs from the bedroom floor, she made her way out of the room, and went to the kitchen for a cup of tea. Content and happy, she sat on the sofa with her cat curled up in her lap and relived the events of the last hour. It was too soon to think about consequences or the future; it was a magical time to forget the past and ignore the future.

* * *

Two hours later, she heard the lamp switch on in the bedroom and Sherlock beginning to stir. Dropping Toby to the floor, she grabbed her brother’s box of clothes from her storage closet and took it into the bedroom. 

“We need to leave in about an hour, I think,” she said, and couldn’t suppress a grin. “Sleep well?”

He answered it with a bit of a satisfied smirk. “Very.” 

They looked through the box and Sherlock finally settled on a pair of grey tracksuit bottoms which had seen better days, a plain black t-shirt and a Man U jumper. He also took a pair of socks which looked fairly new, and a hat to hide his hair under until he could cut it. 

Molly pulled out an old backpack, which was black with pink accents but would do, and they put in anything he wasn’t wearing, a change of boxers and socks, plus his faked passport and wallet with Euros in it. Molly gave him a old thermos full of coffee, a cheese sandwich and a bag of crisps, plus a bottle of water and a couple of random paperback books, to bulk out the backpack. 

Sherlock added a small notebook, a pen, and one of the two leftover fortune cookies from the takeaway. 

“Shall we?” he said. It was 4 am and pitch black out when they left. They were quiet most of the way down to Poole. Reality was beginning to sink back in again. She was going to have to go back to a world where Sherlock was dead, and she could never, ever, betray by a single word or look that it wasn’t true. He was going to have to make the world a safe place for himself to live again, while pretending to be dead. If anyone could manage it, that person would be Sherlock Holmes, but it wouldn’t be easy. 

They were drawing near the ferry terminal in Poole now, as the dawn started to light up the horizon. 

“You could come with me,” he said without preamble, suddenly. 

“I could,” she said, pulling into the car park and turning off the engine. 

“I’d - I’d like that,” he said. “We’re a good team.”

“Yes, we are,” she said with a smile. “But I’m not - I’m not going with you.” She turned and looked at him, frank and honest. “I want to be another reason for you to come back. When it’s time for you to come back.” 

He unbuckled his seatbelt, leaned forward, and kissed her. “Goodbye,” he said softly. 

“Good luck,” she answered. He opened the car door, giving her a lingering look of farewell, and was gone. She sat silent looking after him until he couldn’t be seen any more, and then still sat silent, waiting. 

The ferry’s horn called, and as she started up her engine, the boat cast off from the pier, heading out of the harbour. She turned the car around and drove home through the early morning commuter traffic, locking her door and setting her phone to silent once she was inside. Toby greeted her with a plaintive mew and she fed him, then saw the other leftover fortune cookie on the kitchen counter that Sherlock hadn’t taken. Idly, she opened the package and cracked the cookie, pulling out the tiny slip of paper inside. 

“Everybody has their own ways of moving on,” she read out loud to herself, and smiled.


End file.
